Lawsuit concedes the bird is still the word for many
X has filed a lawsuit against a social media startup over the Twitter brand, effectively acknowledging that millions still use the Twitter domain, call Elon Musk's platform "Twitter," and their emissions "tweets."
A week ago, Operation Bluebird announced that "after 12 months of quiet work," it had filed to claim the Twitter trademark.
Having acquired Twitter in 2022, billionaire Musk ditched the branding in favor of X a year later. Gone was the bird logo and the name of the company he splurged $44 billion for. Years on, one might assume the name "Twitter" and its associated branding should be fair game, right?
Wrong. In response to Operation Bluebird's attempt to claim the trademark, X's complaint [PDF] snapped back: "Twitter never left and continues to be exclusively owned by X Corp."
The complaint continues: "Each day, more than four million users access the X platform through the TWITTER.com domain; users around the world continue to refer to the platform as TWITTER and posts as TWEETS; consumer- and client-facing webpages continue to use each of the TWITTER Marks; third-party licensees continue to display the TWITTER logo as the social media favicon on their business websites."
Considering the effort Musk and his minions have put into burying Twitter, the acknowledgement that millions of users still reject Musk's preferred X is telling. X could have gone down the route of simply contesting the trademark claim. Instead, it has gone on the offensive against Operation Bluebird and filed suit.
As well as calling for a halt to Bluebird's attempts to swipe the Twitter branding and demanding that the United States Patent and Trademark Office "be directed to deny and invalidate Bluebird's application to register the infringing TWITTER mark," the suit also calls for damages.
The Twitter brand might be buried, but in its lawsuit, X has admitted that millions of users still cling to it. Musk's soapbox is therefore not about to let anybody start poking around its grave. ®